Brontes:I, uh, wow. Has the Middle East frozen over? Is Limbaugh flying?

Believe it or not, the NRA and ACLU have a working relationship when it comes to court battles. There is significant overlap between the 2nd and 4th Amendment, as well as privacy and HIPAA concerns, that leads to the ACLU and NRA jumping on board each others ships when it comes to certain gun legislation.

Believe it or not, the NRA and ACLU have a working relationship when it comes to court battles. There is significant overlap between the 2nd and 4th Amendment, as well as privacy and HIPAA concerns, that leads to the ACLU and NRA jumping on board each others ships when it comes to certain gun legislation.

This.2nd Amendment rights are civil rights, same as the rest. Both organizations actively work to uphold civil rights.Yes, the NRA is awful for having a ludicrous right-wing bias (in many cases endorsing R candidates with virtually identical gun rights stances as their D opponents), supporting right wing initiatives that have nothing to do with gun control (such as anti abortion efforts), and giving Nugent's stupid ass another pulpit to spew his idiocy from.By the same token, the ACLU is known for having a very pronounced left wing political bias as well.That being said, the NRA the only organization with power to affect the legislative process in the interest of preserving 2nd Amendment rights, which is the one aspect of the Bill of Rights that the ACLU is usually reluctant to fight for.Ultimately, the ACLU and the NRA are counterparts in the same effort. I'm a card-carrying member of both.The Second Amendment Foundation (which I'm also a member of) wins court battles, but that only goes so far when new anti-civil rights efforts take place every day, and the NRA together with the ACLU actively fight these infringements becoming possible in the first place.

Maybe it's just the cider talking, but I wonder why nobody has brought the Third into play.

Yeah, the Third Amendment, the one everyone forgets about. The state has no right to demand - on pain of whatever may or may not have happened to the CEO of Qwest - that the state's routers be quarted in civilian datacenters without the consent of said civilians. Civilian owners of datacenters are free to co-operate with the government, and I'll even accept that the government has the right to do whatever it wants without the consent of the civilians to the bits of wire exiting the civilian-owned datacenter, but the government doesn't have a right to demand such co-operation.

A very drunk version of me might even suggest that CALEA is an infringement of the Third, but the drunken strict constructionist in me reminds me that the "LEA"s in CALEA are still technically civilians, and not soldiers, so that's going to get laughed out of the courts. NSA, on the other hand, is an arm of DoD, and a service provider that really wanted to play hardball (and which was willing to get shut down for non-cooperation regardless of the outcome of the court case) just might have a legal angle on this.

tl;dr: if I had a billion dollars or owned a startup that was threatened by this sort of thing and was already willing to shut down the company as a matter of principle (difficulty factor: that first bit about "if I had a billion dollars"), hiring some lawyers to mount a third-amendment challenge would be lulzy.

cc_rider:Brontes: I, uh, wow. Has the Middle East frozen over? Is Limbaugh flying?Believe it or not, the ACLU has even defended that oxy-eating turd, too.https://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/aclu-asks-court-protect- co nfidentiality-rush-limbaughs-medical-recordsEven assholes have rights.

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."-H. L. Mencken

Krumet:cc_rider: Brontes: I, uh, wow. Has the Middle East frozen over? Is Limbaugh flying?Believe it or not, the ACLU has even defended that oxy-eating turd, too.https://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/aclu-asks-court-protect- co nfidentiality-rush-limbaughs-medical-recordsEven assholes have rights.

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."-H. L. Mencken

Believe it or not, the NRA and ACLU have a working relationship when it comes to court battles. There is significant overlap between the 2nd and 4th Amendment, as well as privacy and HIPAA concerns, that leads to the ACLU and NRA jumping on board each others ships when it comes to certain gun legislation.

You also have to realize that the Government has thrown out the Patriot Act's explicit requirement that the business records they seize be relevant to a terrorism investigation.

Given the fact that they are already ignoring the law, there is noting to prevent them from seizing the records of all gun sellers and creating a searchable database.

Exactly the sort of thing guaranteed to get the NRA interested in the fight.

Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin filed supporting briefs. Sensenbrenner is a co-author of the 2001 Patriot Act, which the NSA has cited as the basis of the surveillance. "The defendants attempt to justify their practice of collecting the records of every telephone call made to or from the United States, including purely domestic calls, by claiming that Congress intended to authorize precisely such a program," Sensenbrenner's brief argues. "But Congress intended no such thing."

I read this as:

"I wrote the bill, but it's not REALLY what I intended to write."

Oh really? That's how it works. So next time I don't want to pay a client, I can go to court and say, "Well I sign a contract for these rates, but that's not REALLY what I intended to pay them."

Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin filed supporting briefs. Sensenbrenner is a co-author of the 2001 Patriot Act, which the NSA has cited as the basis of the surveillance. "The defendants attempt to justify their practice of collecting the records of every telephone call made to or from the United States, including purely domestic calls, by claiming that Congress intended to authorize precisely such a program," Sensenbrenner's brief argues. "But Congress intended no such thing."

I read this as:

"I wrote the bill, but it's not REALLY what I intended to write."

Oh really? That's how it works. So next time I don't want to pay a client, I can go to court and say, "Well I sign a contract for these rates, but that's not REALLY what I intended to pay them."

"The defendants attempt to justify their practice of collecting the records of every telephone call made to or from the United States, including purely domestic calls, by claiming that Congress intended to authorize precisely such a program," Sensenbrenner's brief argues. "But Congress intended no such thing."

Then, I don't know, how about you change the law to remove any and all ambiguity, and make it perfectly farking clear what you intend!

RobSeace:"The defendants attempt to justify their practice of collecting the records of every telephone call made to or from the United States, including purely domestic calls, by claiming that Congress intended to authorize precisely such a program," Sensenbrenner's brief argues. "But Congress intended no such thing."

Then, I don't know, how about you change the law to remove any and all ambiguity, and make it perfectly farking clear what you intend!

Again, the problem isn't that the word "relevant" does not have a legal definition.

However, you'll be happy to know that the guy in TFA and others on the House Judiciary committee have made it clear that section 215 of the Patriot Act will not be authorized again the next time it expires.

dittybopper:No Time To Explain: Brontes: I, uh, wow. Has the Middle East frozen over? Is Limbaugh flying?

maybe Saddam rose from the grave?

/interestingly odd bedfellows//waits and sees

It's not all that interesting or odd. The NRA and ACLU have worked together before.

The only thing that has traditionally prevented that isn't the NRA, but the institutional belief in the ACLU was that the Second Amendment didn't protect an individual right to keep and bear arms.

Even today, they are very uncomfortable with the idea of people having a substantive right to own guns.

What they tend to work with the NRA on, though, is privacy matters, and they've done it before. For odd bedfellows, they should be comfortable with each other by now on stuff like this.

It's moot anyway - the ACLU never works to restrict or constrict ANY right, so any gun owner who is hostile to them is being led.Different people need to do different work - if everybody tried to do the same job, the employment lines would be really long

sendtodave:Krumet: cc_rider: Brontes: I, uh, wow. Has the Middle East frozen over? Is Limbaugh flying?Believe it or not, the ACLU has even defended that oxy-eating turd, too.https://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/aclu-asks-court-protect- co nfidentiality-rush-limbaughs-medical-recordsEven assholes have rights.

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."-H. L. Mencken

MREbomber:That being said, the NRA the only organization with power to affect the legislative process in the interest of preserving 2nd Amendment rights, which is the one aspect of the Bill of Rights that the ACLU is usually reluctant to fight for.

What's the point in focussing its limited resource there when there is a powerful, vociferous and wealthy organisation whose entire focus is that issue. The NRA will deal with them, so they concentrate their resources on what the NRA doesn't care to make an effort about i.e. any civil rights that don't relate to guns. The NRA wouldn't fight slavery so long as they got to keep their guns.

Nofun:"I wrote the bill, but it's not REALLY what I intended to write."

Oh really? That's how it works. So next time I don't want to pay a client, I can go to court and say, "Well I sign a contract for these rates, but that's not REALLY what I intended to pay them."

In proper countries any public statements made by the writer(s) of a Bill should be taken into account when interpreting it. This has been true for about 500 years. Google "mischief rule", "purposive approach" and "extrinsic material".

Purposivism can and does occur in America, as much as you're all obsessed with strict literalism.

BullBearMS:Nofun: "I wrote the bill, but it's not REALLY what I intended to write."

Um... No.

The legal term, "relevance", has a real meaning.

Records seized under the Patriot Act must be relevant to a terrorism investigation.

What the Obama administration is doing instead is ignoring the law and seizing everybody's records.

My point is that the law would appear to be too ambiguously written in this sense, and the guy who helped write it would appear to be trying to shift the blame to an agency taking advantage of the law. I'm glad he's on the right side of the debate, having his support is very helpful for this cause, but it seems more like a way to save face than genuine outrage.